Introduction

GALE Phase 3 and 4 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC). Along with other corpora, the parallel text in this release comprised training data for Phases 3 and 4 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program. This corpus contains Chinese source text and corresponding English translations selected from broadcast news data collected by LDC between 2006 and 2008 and transcribed and translated by LDC or under its direction.

Data

GALE Phase 3 and 4 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text includes 76 source-translation document pairs, comprising 614,608 tokens of Chinese source text and its English translation. Data is drawn from 16 distinct Chinese programs broadcast between 2006 and 2008 by China Central TV (CCTV), a national and international broadcaster in Mainland China and Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong-based satellite television station. The programs in this release feature news programs on current events topics.

The files in this release were transcribed by LDC staff and/or transcription vendors under contract to LDC in accordance with the Quick Rich Transcription guidelines developed by LDC. Transcribers indicated sentence boundaries in addition to transcribing the text. Data was manually selected for translation according to several criteria, including linguistic features, transcription features and topic features. The transcribed and segmented files were then reformatted into a human-readable translation format and assigned to translation vendors. Translators followed LDC's Chinese to English translation guidelines. Bilingual LDC staff performed quality control procedures on the completed translations.

Source data and translations are distributed in TDF format. TDF files are tab-delimited files containing one segment of text along with meta information about that segment. Each field in the TDF file is described in TDF_format.txt. All data are encoded in UTF-8.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, GALE Program Grant No. HR0011-06-1-0003. The content of this publication does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the Government, and no official endorsement should be inferred.